ABSTRACT
Santayana's return to England in fall 1923, after four years on the continent, was "very unpleasant," he later reported to Beal. Howard Sturgis was dead, and a visit to Frank Russell led only to "the wicked earls" charge that he had been disloyal. Santayana's opinions of modernism in painting and literature will appear to many as old fogeyism or hardening of the aesthetic arteries and inability to respond to the unfamiliar. Without question, the single most distinctive work of Santayana's productive postwar period, or any in his life, was Scepticism and Animal Faith. At the center of Scepticism and Animal Faith is Santayana's all-important doctrine of essence, which he enunciates for the first time. The inner discourse of literary psychology (as of psychoanalysis) assumes some manner of achieving truth. Truth is an essence and need not be posited in inner discourse.
